A Look At Why Linux Graphics Drivers Have Issues

[JanC]

donate Intel hardware to Intel engineers?

You are aware Intel has own engineers on its linux drivers?! Period. You are also aware, that Intel works good in Linux?! For example, I have pentium 4 IGP for media center and my relatives have sandybridge 2105 - both working perfectly on opensource drivers. Instead of shitting here, go work and donate money/hardware to them. How about that? Or you start trolling again how bad things are NOT?

So, now we have to donate Intel hardware to Intel engineers?

[crazycheese]

Why all those dudes of Xorg and nuveaou and others combine their effort to actually support nvidia and amd properly without intel. So that we can have completely tearing free desktops and completely tearing free video playback with real sync to vblank. None of the drivers from nvidia or amd provide tearing free desktops and completely tearing free video playback so the whole discussion of dma buffer or other switching is completely pointless as none of those companies provide any working linux drivers whatsover. So switching between one non working shit and another non working shit is not an issue. The issue is a LACK of tearing free desktops and LACK of completely tearing free video playback and LACK of real sync to vblank in any configuration. Period.

You are aware Intel has own engineers on its linux drivers?! Period. You are also aware, that Intel works good in Linux?! For example, I have pentium 4 IGP for media center and my relatives have sandybridge 2105 - both working perfectly on opensource drivers. Instead of shitting here, go work and donate money/hardware to them. How about that? Or you start trolling again how bad things are NOT?

[JohnXfce]

I have better idea

Why all those dudes of Xorg and nuveaou and others combine their effort to actually support nvidia and amd properly without intel. So that we can have completely tearing free desktops and completely tearing free video playback with real sync to vblank. None of the drivers from nvidia or amd provide tearing free desktops and completely tearing free video playback so the whole discussion of dma buffer or other switching is completely pointless as none of those companies provide any working linux drivers whatsover. So switching between one non working shit and another non working shit is not an issue. The issue is a LACK of tearing free desktops and LACK of completely tearing free video playback and LACK of real sync to vblank in any configuration. Period.

[Bryce Harrington]

graph

This is a development workflow graph, it's not a metric and should not be used to compare quality between drivers. There are several parameters used for generating this graph which make it completely irrelevant for drawing any conclusions about anything you end users care about.

To the questions about the color palette, it is auto generated.

To the questions about 8xx; those chips are partly supported upstream but are not supported in Ubuntu thus no bugs in those architectures pertain to data shown in this graph.

[AJenbo]

Well I could write and maintain a KMS driver for it :-)

[Gusar]

Honestly i really don't care about 3D on a pre OGL 2.1 card. But KMS and possibly some 2D would be nice.

Not a chance. If you look at the source, the i810 driver is in a folder called "legacy". It will not be getting any new features. Which means you get basic modesetting and Xv. That's it. Though it would be fun to know if 3D still works, for things like UT99

[AJenbo]

Honestly i really don't care about 3D on a pre OGL 2.1 card. But KMS and possibly some 2D would be nice.

[Gusar]

Yeah that was the divide that i seamed to remember and the cards i was thinking about are i810. Do you know what my chances with this hardware going forwarded?

Oh, you have an i810? I kinda wish I had that, just to play around with. As far as I know, this is the situation:

- concerning modesetting, there's no KMS, but X should have the correct resolution. no idea about dual-screen, probably not supported
- concerning 2D, there's only XAA, which is useless nowadays, so you're basically without acceleration. you do get Xv for video playback, at least that
- concerning 3D, there is a kernel DRM module and a DRI1 driver. the intel manpage says only 16bit is supported, but no idea if even that still works

[AJenbo]

Sorry your right it was of cause mesa and not Xorg that doped the DRI1 drivers. However not enabled by default and in -dev doesn't count as working in my book, but its good to see that it is being worked on

Edit: When I talk about 8xx above, I mean Gen2 hardware. I mention this because there's also i810, which is Gen1.

Yeah that was the divide that i seamed to remember and the cards i was thinking about are i810. Do you know what my chances with this hardware going forwarded?

[perpetualrabbit]

Interesting chart. The article is short on analysis and meaningful hypothesis. The chart colors appear to have been chosen by a tetrachromat.

Hahaha, a tetrachromat, I was thinking the exact same thing.

The graphs on phoronix tend to have similar colours which makes then often really difficult to interpret.